Google vs. Bing

I was surprised to read this on the Register. If Vijay Gill is right, Microsoft’s cloud solution seems quaint. Google’s approach to IT issues is design thinking in action- the sort of scalable dynamic solutions that are enabling their applications to have as flexible a foundation as possible.

As an example, he said, Microsoft is working to juice the performance of its Virtual Earth mapping service using so-called “edge technologies” – a combination of Akamai-like CDN (content delivery network) tools and actual code that runs at the edge of the network. “We’re looking at a mixture of approaches and trying to solve problems for specific applications and types of applications,” he said.

At which point, Gill piped up to explain – in his matter-of-fact monotone – why Microsoft’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed. He pointed his audience to a blog post where an online real estate outfit called Redfin says it recently ditched Microsoft Virtual Earth for Google Maps. Yes, Redfin believes that Google gives better performance.

“Our approach is a little more absolute than [Microsoft’s],” Gill said. “Not only does getting to the end user have to be fast, but the back-end has to be extremely fast too…[We are] virtualizing the entire fabric so you get maximum utilization and speed on a global basis as opposed to local fixes – putting one service in a data center, for example, in Denver.

“You want to figure out how you want to distribute that across the entire system so you get it as horizontal as needed, which is essentially the definition of cloud computing.”